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ORA600 Ltd., Oracle Consultancy

Welcome to the website for ORA600 LTD, the working company for
Martin Widlake.

{As of 15th June 2009 this site is being developed and
populated. Please be patient if there is a menu option or link that
fails to links to anything right now}

This site contains not just information about who I am and what I
do but also SQL scripts, PowerPoint presentations, bits of PL/SQL and
papers that you may or may not find useful. Feel free to browse and
use whatever you find. I just ask that you leave the name of the
author an any item used. The usual disclaimer - I and ORA600 Ltd take
no responsibility for the consequences of you using anything you find
on this site. Site disclaimer.

If you find any of it useful, it would be nice if you could drop me
an email to say so.

Martin Widlake and Services Provided

I am an independent Oracle Consultant specialising in database
architect, performance and VLDBs, providing short and medium term
support in these areas.
I can also help with Project
Managment and I also occasionally run training courses on SQL, Oracle
and performance tuning.

I have been working with Oracle technologies since 1992 and I.T in
general since 1989. I've been a consultant for Oracle Corp in the UK,
a jobbing contractor for several years, a permanent employee &
manager and am now independent again. You can see full details of my
career to date at about me.

I am based South of Cambridge, not far from Stansted Airport, which
has proved handy for European work. I am more than happy to travel to
client sites but I like to work from home where it is acceptable -
time spent travelling is often not productive time and there are Green
considerations as well.

My areas of expertise are:

Performance Tuning

I have been tuning SQL, databases and applications for 15 years. I
take the approach that there has to be a business benefit to
tuning. Taking a report that runs for 2 minutes and tuning it to run
in 20 seconds is only of benefit if the business has an issue with the
2 minute delay for the report or the report is run so often it is
slowing the system as a whole down.

Tuning is not just about making SQL run faster or tweaking the
database to benefit one area of the workload. It is about looking at
the whole process being carried out, identifying the critical
components to tune and concentrating on where most gain can be made.
Sometimes the fastest way to do something is simply not to do it.

I can help with critical tuning issues, performance health checks
and in long term performance monitoring, analysis and planning.

Database Architecture

Getting an architecture right can avoid many issues with
performance, management and resilience.

I have designed and implemented data warehouses that have scaled to
close to 100TB. I have designed and implemented OLTP systems over 5TB
in size. VLDBs have been a speciality of mine since I first started
working with Oracle in 1993. By designing in backup, recovery,
archival and access requirements from the start, many expensive issues
are avoided further down the line.

I have a history of using new features of Oracle where they are of
benefit to the system being developed. {I was once awarded Oracle Beta
Tester of the year by Oracle Magazine for my work with Oracle 10
Beta - however, I cut my hand open on the trophy!}.

I balance the use of the latest technology with a belief that the
simplest solution is often the best. For example, I do not use RAC
unless there is a real need for some feature, such as immediate node
failover, or there really is no way a single node can provide the
processing power needed.

I am happy to assist with either the design of a new system or in
enhancing/modifying an existing installation to improve its stability,
performance or recoverability.

Training

I have run several types of training courses over the years,
usually as a result of a specific request. I have run introductory SQL
course, advanced SQL courses, Oracle fundamentals, Tuning,
Partitioning and Oracle Standards courses. I prepare the materials and
give the courses myself. They lack the glossy handouts and
pretty graphics of many training courses but I present only on what I
know from real experience. The feedback I receive is always excellent
and most people seem to appreciate my training style.

Project Management

Many projects and teams fail to achieve what they could achieve due to two opposing problems :-

Some teams react constantly to the immediate crises that face
them day by day, hour by hour, or the sudden requirements coming from
their clients. Strong technical skills keep digging them out of the
holes they constantly find themselves dropped in.

Other teams and projects implement a rigorous and extensive set
of processes, cross checks, review points and work flows to ensure
everything is done correctly and mistakes are caught. But spend so
long running the process that the actual project work suffers.

Neither approach is, in my experience, ideal. Processes smooth the
flow of work, planning and scheduling maximise resource usage and
avoid wasted work, but both need to be lightweight enough to avoid
carrying a burden greater than the waste they avoid.

When I carry out Project Management work I take the approach of
“Just enough Process to Perform”. I also try to look at
beyond the immediate project, so that whatever is implemented can be
managed and looked after into the future

Presentations, Associations and Interests

I am an active member of the UK Oracle User Group
(UKOUG) http://www.ukoug.org/. I
have presented at the annual conference every year since 2003, except
last year when I was in Thailand riding elephants. I hope to return to
presenting at
the technology
conference again in 2009, but I plan to be there whether I present
or not.

I regularly present at the technical Special Interest Groups, in
particular
the DBMS
and UNIX
SIGs and Northern Server Technology days, usually on either aspects of
performance tuning, Very Large Databases (VLDBs) or disaster projects
and what we can do to learn from them or avoid them.

I am currently chair of
the Management
& Infrastructure SIG, which aims to consider Oracle technology
at the corporate level and how it fits in with the whole company
infrastructure, plus considerations of managing both the teams,
responsibilities and interactions required of large or complex Oracle
users.

I used to be on the board of
the Oracle
Life Science User Group, an international user group that focuses
on the bio-pharma, medical and biological sciences use of Oracle. I
have a background in genetics and zoology and worked for a scientific
research organisation for several years, thus the interest. I still
keep in touch with the Bioinformatics world.

I am also an associate of Dennis
Adams Associates, an organisation that specialises in
light-weight, effective process and IT production management.